Winamp is a rather old program, and to some people it represents a bygone era- the late 90’s and early 2000’s in particular. However I’ve not found any “modern” software that compares. There is plenty of software- MediaMonkey, MusicBee- etc which attempts to mimic Winamp, or provides the same general capability of managing a local music library, but they either don’t support Winamp Plugins, don’t work properly with many such plugins- or, most importantly, don’t add anything.

Not adding anything is the important one here. At best, I’m getting the same experience as I do with Winamp, so I’m not gaining anything. People ask, “Why don’t you switch” and the default answer is “Why should I?” If the only reason is because what I am currently using is “outdated” and no longer cool, then maybe I should stick with it because we have something in common.

Typically, I’m losing functionality, though. With Winamp I’ve got everything setup largely how I want. More importantly, it spans not only FLAC and MP3 Music files, but my Music Library also incorporated various Video Game Music formats for various systems, with complete audio libraries for any number of game titles that I can pull up easily. These are native formats which are much smaller than if those tracks were encoded as MP3 or FLAC and since they are native formats they use Winamp plugins, Which provide additional features for adjusting audio capabilities. These plugins simply don’t exist or don’t work with modern software, so I’d have to relegate those video game music formats to specific, individual players if I was to switch to say “MusicBee” for my local music library.

Nowadays, even the concept of a local Audio Library is practically unheard of. People “Listen to music” by using streaming services or even just via youtube videos, and typically it is all done via a smartphone where storage space tends to be at a greater premium as well. I find that I detest playing music on my Phone (Nexus 6) simply because there is no good software for managing Music saved to the local storage, and it get’s awful battery life if used this way. This is why I use an older 16GB Sony Walkman MP3 player instead; the battery could probably playback for a good continuous 48 hours, and it is much more compact than the phone is. And even if this means an extra piece of “equipment” when I go somewhere, it means that I’m not wasting my phone’s battery life to play music.

Recently, I had the need to do something that is nearly as “outdated” as the program I elected to do it, which is burning an Audio CD. I’ve found this to be the easiest way to transfer music to my Original XBox Console to create custom soundtracks (something which seems to be unique among consoles altogether). So I popped in a CD-RW, opened winamp, clicked on the CD Recorder…. and got a BSOD. DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION.

Well, not that isn’t supposed to happen. After determining it was reproducible, I looked further into it. In particular I found that within the Current Control Set information for my hardware CDROM had an LowerFilters driver specified for PxHlpa64. So, I set about searching what this was.

I found that PxHlpa64 is a Driver by “Sonic Solutions” which is used by some CD Recording software. I couldn’t find any such software that uses it installed, so I merely renamed the affected key and rebooted. The problem went away and everything was as it should be. (And I subsequently wiped out the directory containing the driver file) I suspect that I installed a program previously which used the driver file and the uninstall didn’t remove it for any of a number of reasons.

One of the advantages of having a bit of an idea what is going on with Windows (or any OS really) is that you can more intelligently attempt to solve these sorts of unexpected problems you may encounter. Since I was aware of issues involving Optical drivers and driver “Filter” settings I was able to find and fix the cause of my issues fairly quickly.